Pug’s Place

I’m not writing much on my blog; part of this is because of wrist stress, but that’s getting better now that I’ve acquired a better keyboard, taller chair, etc. The rest of it has to do with activities such as:

• Odette being in town
• Playing Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
• Hacking on our phone system which runs on Asterisk
• Hacking on our TV system which is MythTV
• Flying, studying aviation things or plotting future aviation adventures

Most recently, Odette and I went to Kitt Peak, Sedona, saw Andre Modeste Gretry’s Beauty and the Beast opera from 1771 and the Arizona Renaissance Festival, though she spoke of all this already. I’ll finish my post on that week sometime in the next week or so with nice inlined pictures for your viewing pleasure. I also hiked the Siphon Draw trail in the Superstition Mountains on Sunday with Chris and Amy - pictures to come, but for now here’s someone else’s description.

I’ve spent the last two nights correcting some reliability issues with our telephone system: it runs on a computer, the computer may go down, so now I’ve made it so it’ll run on two computers (one at a time) with the alternate constantly monitoring the primary and performing a live fail-over in the event a problem… yeah, okay, overkill for a home network.

Speaking of our phone system, did I mention that I installed one here at the house? So if you dial my Arizona phone number (ask) your call is answered by our PBX… and if you’re calling from a toll free phone number (like a telemarketer is) you’re not allowed to talk to me (it as if you were in a cult). Instead, you get to leave a message, followed by screaming monkeys. Dial 9 when you connect to make it ‘pretend’ you’re a telemarketer - great for amusing your friends.

Also, we’re now running MythTV on our home network. MythTV is an open-source TiVo-like piece of software for Linux. We have a small, quiet frontend machine hooked up to the 40″ HDTV and a backend machine capable of recording 2 standard definition and 1 high-definition show simultaneously… with 1.5 terabytes of available video storage online in a RAID5. We don’t do things half-way, I suppose. Anyway, MythTV is like a TiVo except that it automatically strips out commercials, rips DVDs, plays mp3s, burns DVDs of TV shows, handles our NetFlix queue, has more storage and can record more shows at once. Oh, and it doesn’t have a subscription fee. How can you go wrong? Well, it’s needed a fair amount of setup (since we’re doing non-standard things like the two-computer setup).

And… well, that’s about it for technical stuff, and now I’m going to head off to bed.

Expect another blog post about topics more of you care about in the next few days.